Following is a guest post from Hans Kullin, our lead strategist in the Nordic region. Hans does the same kind of work as the rest of the digital strategy team - advising clients on digital strategy and integration, social media, and other related topics. You can learn more about Hans at his twitter or on his personal blog. Please check out our other guest posts too.

Although uptake has probably been slower than in the U.S., blogging has definitely taken off in the Nordic region during the last few years. For example, it is estimated that there are now 350,000 blogs in Sweden and that 21% of the population in Sweden are members of an online community. Customers are sharing opinions and content with each other online through social media. To find out what businesses are doing to tap into this conversation, Burson-Marsteller surveyed the adoption of corporate blogging among the largest listed companies in the Nordic region, with a market capitalization of more than 1 billion euro. We found that 9.1%, or 12 out of the 132 companies have at least one company sponsored blog. Four of those twelve companies with blogs have two or more blogs associated with the company.

But the adoption of corporate blogging is not evenly spread across the region. Ten of the 56 companies (17.9%) that are listed on the Swedish Large Cap list have one or more corporate blogs. That is an even higher percentage than the 14.8% of Fortune 500 companies with corporate blogs, identified in a separate survey by Burson-Marsteller in February and March this year. Corporate blogging is less common in Finland and Norway, were only one company in each country had a corporate blog (of 27 and 25 respectively). In Denmark none of the 24 surveyed companies published a blog.

Other findings:

• Nine out of the twelve companies have commenting functionality enabled on at least one blog.
• Three out of the twelve companies have trackbacks enabled on at least one blog.
• Nine out of the twelve companies have RSS enabled on at least one blog.
• Two out of twelve companies have social bookmarks enabled on at least one blog.
• Industrials is the sector with most blogging companies (4), followed by Telecommunications Services (3), Information Technology (2), Consumer Discretionary (1), Financials (1) and Energy (1).

The commitment to blogs varies a lot between the different companies. While some have integrated the blogs into the corporate site and discuss topics close to the core business, others are treating blogs more as an experiment. For example, two of the Swedish companies (Tele2 and West Siberian Resources Ltd.) have shut down their blogs since the research was performed.
For more information download the full white paper or check out the presentation deck on slideshare.